


ice-creams and cheesecakes

by harajukucrepes



Category: NCT (Band)
Genre: All/win to the greatest level possible, Canon Compliant, Everyone takes care of Winwin, Gen, Half-baked attempt at groupfic, Loads of inside jokes?, Lucas is very loud, Mark has crazy ideas, Winwin-pandering, partially baked attempt at humour
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-01
Updated: 2018-07-01
Packaged: 2019-05-31 17:19:17
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,244
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15124217
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/harajukucrepes/pseuds/harajukucrepes
Summary: Sicheng wakes up as a 5-year-old. NCT Dream comes to the hyungs' rescue.





	ice-creams and cheesecakes

**Author's Note:**

> \- This was written in like 3 hours  
> \- There's no purpose to this fic other than a burst of idea and a need to write  
> \- This is the most self-indulgent thing ever  
> \- There's quite a lot of meta i think

*

ice-creams and cheesecakes

*

 

 

Taeil wakes up finding Yuta in abject panic.

“Hyung,” he’s saying, eyeballs widen in horror, “help. Sicheng can’t Korean today.”

Taeil immediately wonders if he should get back to bed. “What the—what’s happening?”

“This is going to take some time but hear me out.” Yuta says and takes a long, deep, breath.

On the other side of the room, Sicheng’s sitting nervously.

“So I woke up and went for a run at the threadmill today, then I came back seeing him at the side of the room and refusing to talk to me. I asked if he had a nightmare, and he couldn’t understand me. Then after a few minutes, I resorted to speaking Mandarin and he told me he was looking for his mother.”

Taeil thinks he should really go back to bed.

“Hyung, just so you know, I’m about to sound an alarm in the group chat—the one without the manager-hyung—and we need to wake Kun, Renjun and Chenle up immediately.”

 

 

*

 

 

Johnny has had moments where he feels proud of his team, but the feeling is especially profound today when he realises that he understands the conversation between Kun, Renjun, Chenle, and the allegedly amnesiac Sicheng. Not entirely, but half of it. Maybe a great portion of it.

“So, hyung,” Renjun starts. “I think we have a problem. Sicheng-ge thinks he’s five years old.”

Xuxi breaks into deafening laughter. “OH MY GOD this is the cutest thing ever! Do you guys mind if I carry him on my shoulder???” He shakes Sicheng and puts his arm around his waist to carry him.

Renjun, on the other hand, shifts nervously. “He says he doesn’t recognise us, doesn’t know why he’s here, just that he really wants his mother and he’s very hungry.”

Kun interjects. “And to make matters worse, his Mandarin is barely conversational, I think he might be more familiar with Wenzhounese, but none of us can understand it.”

They turn to Chenle, who only shrugs and says that his translator gadget can’t recognise dialects.

Johnny has seen weirder things and he’s confident that they can bounce back from this strange new event that’s happening right now as long as nobody else is affected by the sudden change, but Taeyong beside him looks like he’s about to faint.

 

 

*

 

 

They sure are lucky that today’s practise day, because NCT 116 is debuting in about a month and they are all preparing to meet the A&R team to finalise their title tracks for another album for second half of 2018, but it doesn’t mean that Sicheng suddenly mentally turning into a child is less of a concern to Taeyong.

First, nobody knows what caused it, not even Yuta. Second, not even their Chinese teammates are much help. Third, nobody knows how long would the condition last. Doyoung is intensely doing his research even though everybody knows that nothing would turn up. And fourth—and the most troublesome one—is that everyone else is suddenly competing to see who toddler Sicheng would like most.

“Look, I’m not saying that he would like me best—even though he totally would, who am I even kidding—but I know him so well, I’m basically one of of his braincells, ok?” Yuta’s preening.

“Say this, Xu. Xi. Oh my god you’re so cute.” Xuxi gives him a high five.

“Hi~” Jungwoo hands out a candy nervously. “My name is Jin Ting You.”

“From now on, I’m Lele-ge.” Chenle proclaims with his chest protruding out.

“Don’t cry, don’t cry, it’s just scissors—Renjun-hyung please tell him.” Jisung panics.

“We are all your _geges_ , friends, ok?” Jaehyun pets him.

“Yuta has it all wrong, nobody is best positioned to talk to him other than me, ok. We are both elementary Mandarin learners so we would bond the best.” Ten says.

“Winwin _gege_ —oops Sicheng gege, ah nope, that’s not it. Sicheng _didi_ , you can call me Mark.” Jeno and Jaemin hiding behind Mark as he introduces himself with simple English, holding themselves back from poking Sicheng.

Taeyong wants the day to be over and Sicheng back to normal, but next to him, Doyoung’s reading out some scientific findings about psychological traumas causing temporary dissociation that can be seen as age regression and Taeyong feels like he’s going out of breath.

 

 

*

 

 

Yuta’s assigned the first two hours of babysitting.

“Are you hungry?” he asks Sicheng, putting him on his lap. It feels a little awkward to be doing it but they all agreed that they would need to treat him that way despite the fact that he’s fives times taller and heavier than most five-year-olds.

“No, I’m not hungry,” Sicheng says softly while playing with his fingernails. Yuta has learned to read him effectively throughout the years and he recognises immediately that Sicheng’s overwhelmed by everything.

“Hey,” he says, wrapping both Sicheng’s hands in his palm. “You can’t. Need to eat, ok?”

Sicheng looks at him with his glassy eyes and Yuta’s immediately brought back to the first day they had seen him arriving in their dorm. Not many of them took any immediate liking to him, especially because the managers seem to indicate that he was going to be part of the group of boys to be shortlisted to debut and a lot of the existing trainees started moaning about preferential treatments. Yuta himself wasn’t particularly resentful, especially because he knew that he was pretty much one of those confirmed debuts, but it did sting a bit seeing someone like Sicheng coming in and abruptly disturbing their existing ecosystem. They were supposed to follow an invisible ladder en route to debut, but that was destroyed when he came in and Teacher Lee Soo Man immediately gave him a stage name.

“Ok,” Sicheng says finally. “Gege, I want ice-cream.”

Yuta smiles. _You’re like a magical boy, do you know that?_

“Too early,” he replies. “We’ll eat some buns.”

 

 

*

 

 

Kun’s glad that his team members are all conversational in Mandarin, kind of, because by the time Yuta’s babysitting hours are up, Sicheng’s all well-fed and well-comforted. It probably also helps that the hyungs spoil him on daily basis, he thinks, so it’s probably nothing new for them.

Taeyong updates them in their group chat that the managers have agreed to give them the day off because half of them suddenly came down with flu—Kun didn’t know that the Dream gang is so good at acting and that the managers would be so easily convinced with additional push from Doyoung, who promised the managers that they would DEFINITELY all get well-rested today so that they could double their practise time tomorrow—and that being locked up in a room together might cause all eighteen of them to get sick at the same time.

(They are currently busy coming up with formations that would outdo Black on Black and Jisung is kind of pivotal to the part they are supposed to be rehearsing.)

In exchange, Taeyong has agreed to gather some members to meet up with the A&R team to finalise the next NCT U song that would be released to make up for the time lost and handling over the caretaking duties to Kun, who’s not having a particularly great time fending off the “sick” dream gang from hoarding the new baby of the team.

“Hyung, you gotta let me have this,” Jisung’s whining. “I spent so much time as the baby now let me be the actual hyung.”

“Kun-ge, you’ll need me around, Jisung’s hopeless in Mandarin,” Chenle follows it up.

“I’ll teach him how to play with the hoverboard,” Jaemin offers and Jeno nods enthusiastically behind.

“I’m here to watch them so that they don’t make him cry,” Donghyuck says.

Fortunately for Kun, he’s immune to the cute but unfortunately for him, Sicheng isn’t immune to the temptations. During his designated babysitting hours, Sicheng has fallen down a few times from the hoverboard and Kun hopes desperately that Taeyong wouldn’t mind Sicheng having a few fresh bruises around his kneecaps.

 

 

*

 

 

Sicheng has always been really adorable even as a functioning adult because he has this naturally innocent aura around him that even Doyoung finds impossible to resist, but as a literal child Dongyoung strangely finds him to be not different from the normal.

Once Sicheng the child gets used to the chaos, he seems to be fitting in well and having a lot of fun while slowly picking up some random Korean words here and there. Johnny and Yuta bought a lot of Sicheng’s favourite food enough to make him feel at home and Dongyoung can feel that the members are all enjoying spoiling him because after the initial panic, nobody’s really concerned about bringing adult Sicheng back.

“He’s so cute though,” Donghyuck coos as he tucks Sicheng in for an mid-day nap. “He’s older than me so I usually don’t get to pinch him, but now he allows me to pinch him and kiss him and Mark’s going to be so jealous of me.”

Dongyoung tries to reason to them: guys, he says, don’t get too comfortable. We are just buying time, there’s no way we will know if he’s going to turn back to being an adult. If tomorrow comes and he’s still a child, we’ll have to stuff all the choreographies into him—oh my god does he know how to do that flip? Jisung please find out when he wakes up later?

The more Dongyoung thinks, the more he thinks he should panic, but then Mark comes back from the meeting and immediately starts squishing Sicheng.

“Hyung, don’t spoil this moment.”

Doyoung’s glad Sicheng doesn’t have a lot of lines in their songs—as terrible as that sounds.

 

 

*

 

 

Chittaphon introduces himself as Ten, but Sicheng likes Yongqing better. He lets Sicheng run with it because it’s a trouble to explain himself in Chinese.

He takes Sicheng on a stroll around the playground with Xuxi, because Xuxi insisted that children should be exposed to the sunlight and that we should cultivate their Sicheng-ge into adulthood as fast as they probably can. Chittaphon thinks that Xuxi makes no sense whatsoever, but making no sense is everyday Xuxi and the team has been resigned to entertaining him no matter what anyway.

“We should go play with the swing,” Xuxi suggests, and Chittaphon’s suddenly struck by how similar they both are. He’s usually not inclined to go along with Xuxi’s brand of insanity, but this time around he can appreciate his energy level because Sicheng proved to be an abnormally excitable kid, even more than normal because there’s no adulthood holding him back.

Xuxi came into the team and gave the team the thunderous impact not unlike Sicheng, because Xuxi was decisively nuts and as much as the team needed someone like him, he was also a lot to handle—and Chittaphon wasn’t really in the right state of mind to be dealing with someone like that at that time.

One year down the road and he can now appreciate Xuxi for what he is—until Sicheng sees a girl in the playground and Xuxi is visibly teaching him how to flirt.

 

 

*

 

 

Jaehyun finds himself melting when Sicheng climbs up to him asking him for a cheesecake.

“You want cheesecake?”

Sicheng nods as he tugs at his sleeve and he’s reminded of the time when Sicheng came looking for him to learn how to sing.

Jaehyun has always thought of Sicheng as un-idol-like as possible, and he couldn’t fathom how did the company manage to scout him despite his overt unwillingness to act like most idols. The managers chalk it up to Sicheng not knowing much Korean or the Korean pop culture (or pop culture in general, if Jaehyun were to be honest with himself) and that has always been how Sicheng has always managed to escape admonishment, and a tiny part of him is grateful that he could be himself around Sicheng because he doesn’t really judge and doesn’t really question much.

Sometimes Jaehyun wants to ask Sicheng if he was ever aware at the possible resentment towards him, because he’s such a naturally free soul that stuff like that probably had never bothered him. Sometimes Jaehyun wants to ask Sicheng if he was ever resentful of the others, because he could have had a stage for himself but now he has to share it with seventeen other boys who steal the stage more than they could occupy.

Sometimes Jaehyun wants to ask Sicheng if he was ever aware that traces of his past glory would fade off, but then seeing him eating cheesecake so happily makes him realise that Sicheng probably doesn’t think of it too much.

At least that’s what Jaehyun would like to believe.

 

 

*

 

 

The team knows very well that Jungwoo has an affinity for pretty things and even more so, pretty things that are well-loved. That’s why he loves puppies and babies and Xuxi.

Sicheng the toddler has gotten quite competent with the hoverboard by the time his turn to babysit him arrives and it’s dinner time, but with so many people occupying a space, he knows that being alone with anyone is nigh impossible.

He likes not being alone, because sometimes being left alone scares him and Jungwoo is glad that he has never really been alone. Xuxi was there when the other members were busy, Kun was there was Xuxi was busy, and Jaemin and Ten-hyung were around when the rest of the team are healthy. Jungwoo is glad that this year happened, Jungwoo is glad that he got to debut.

He’s pretty sure Sicheng felt the same thing as well—but they don’t really talk about it, so he choose to talk now.

“Hyung,” he says, despite the current condition being otherwise. “I’m glad we are in a team.” He hands him a fist and waits for him.

“You are Jin Ting You.”

“I am Jin Ting You,” Jungwoo repeats.

“You’re very handsome.”

“I’m very handsome.”

“Are you my friend?”

Jungwoo smiles at him. “Yes, I am your friend.”

 

 

*

 

 

Yukhei doesn’t care that the older team members have creases all over their foreheads when night time comes by and Sicheng is still mentally a toddler, because they should be enjoying this moment when they can and they obviously aren’t.

“Sicheng come here,” he says while snapping his finger. “Kiss me here,” he points to his cheek.

Sicheng shakes his head. “No, I don’t want to.”

“Then I’m not giving you ice-cream.” It’s actually going to be Sicheng’s fourth ice-cream of the day and Doyoung-hyung is getting concerned about how much they have been feeding him but Yukhei wants to bask in this rare moment. It’s like getting a new baby brother and he doesn’t understand why the hyungs aren’t more excited about it.

“Ah, no, no,” Sicheng stomps his feet lightly and Yukhei recognises this behaviour in his own baby brother whenever he’s about to throw a tantrum.

“A-ha,” he winks. “So you giving me a kiss?”

Sicheng pouts, but jumps to give him a peck and Yukhei sends a thumbs up to Taeil’s direction.

“This is how you get him to give you a kiss, bro.”

Yuta groans from the corner.

 

 

*

 

 

Mark initially enjoys the unlimited pinching of Sicheng’s cheeks, but as Taeyong grows increasingly worried about what to tell the manager-hyungs when they eventually have to break it to them that Sicheng is currently not capable of being Winwin, Mark starts panicking as well.

“Hey,” he suggests in the Dream group chat. “Do you think we should start teaching Winwin-gege how to dance?”

“Are you crazy?” Chenle replies.

“Are you crazy?” Renjun echoes. “He’s a child.”

“Yeah but he can’t stay like this forever,” Mark tries to reason as he watches Sicheng play with the rubix cube.

“Maybe he’ll turn back tomorrow?” Jeno says.

“What if he wouldn’t,” Jisung asks. Thank god, Mark’s thinking. Someone’s finally being sane.

“What can we do though?” Jaemin chips in.

Mark suddenly sees an opening.

“Guys, I think I have an idea. But we’re not telling the hyungs.”

“Is this a prank?” Donghyuck asks.

“No, not a prank but if we can pull this off, we’ll be able to make the hyungs cry.”

And that’s how Mark Lee got NCT Dream to agree teaching Sicheng how to dance and speak Korean.

“Shall we call Xuxi?” Chenle suggests.

“Oh my god Chenle—NO.”

“Oh jeezus guys stop yelling,” Chenle reacts as the group chat is being spammed with a chorus of objections.

 

 

*

 

 

Renjun shakes Sicheng to wake him up.

“ _Gege, gege_ , wake up, we have no time.”

Sicheng rubs his eyes and swats Renjun away. “No, I want to sleep.”

For a moment, Renjun is almost willing to give in. He’s used to hearing the older team members talk about spoiling Sicheng and letting him have everything he wants because he’s oh so cute and oh so adorable and he’s like a baby and how they can’t believe how excited he is and to an extent Renjun understands it now. Sicheng probably doesn’t even realise it, which kind of adds up to his adorable factor, but Renjun has no time to spoil him. They have a mission to complete.

“Nope, you’re not going back to sleep.”

Sicheng flops back to the bed but Renjun drags him up. “Don’t. Make. Me. Beat. You. Up.” He says slowly, accentuating each and every syllable to make sure that the boy hears him.

“Mark-hyung!” he yells. “We need coffee!”

Renjun thinks long and hard if he should subject Sicheng to caffeine, but then he remembers that Sicheng is physically still an adult.

He doesn’t care that Sicheng’s still whining, he’s getting him up to speed no matter what.

“Don’t be mad at us,” he says to a clueless Sicheng. “We will take care of you.”

 

 

*

 

 

Jeno is assigned to the task of tickling Sicheng whenever he gets sleepy because the rest of them thought that it would be easier that he watches him as they teach him, because someone needs to be a mood reader.

It’s the most useless thing ever and Jeno knows that the guys are trying to make him feel included because Mark and Donghyuck are studying Sicheng’s parts in the dances and Jisung demonstrates, while Jaemin repeatedly flips in order to try coming up with an easy explanation on how to do aerial flips. Renjun and Chenle are frantically studying all the interviews that the hyungs had gone to and write the usual sentences in a cheat sheet.

Jeno really likes the idea of them teaching Sicheng, and it makes him proud that they came up with such an idea when the older hyungs were all ranting at each other. Doyoung hyung especially was very distraught. He keeps a close watch at everyone, just in case someone’s temper flares up and starts a fight.

They are not perfect, Jeno knows, but they have each other. One day, he would be able to tell the hyungs what did they tonight.

“What are you smiling about?” Jaemin asks. “Are you thinking about how cool I am?”

Jeno smiles at him.

“Maybe?”

 

 

*

 

 

Donghyuck is getting increasingly pissed at Mark.

“It’s not about how we would do it, it’s about how hyung does it,” he insists. “Why don’t you look at the video again.” They are looking at Cherry Bomb and debating how to teach Sicheng his solo part which neither of them knew in terms of technicality, because Sicheng’s part requires grace and DongHyuck is insisting that Mark definitely does not have.

Mark is drinking another cup of coffee and getting crankier by the minute. “You say like you have ~grace~ or whatever,” Mark mocks, because they are running out of ideas and Jisung’s attempts end up with him popping everytime there’s a move transition.

Renjun offers to explain but he would need to know the theory behind it but all Mark and Donghyuck could manage was “he came up with it, we just followed it”. It was actually true, because for a group that diverse in skills, the dance teachers actually encouraged them to have more inputs in their moves. Because none of them have similar dance background with Sicheng, none of them knew how to properly explain to him.

Then Sicheng creeps up behind them and says, “that’s easy”, and Donghyuck knows they have been saved.

 

 

*

 

 

It doesn’t take long for Jaemin to teach Sicheng how to do the aerial flip because it turns out that Sicheng has the basics down pat, and he only needs to know about the timing and the position.

Watching Sicheng cram up all the choreographies (lucky for them, there’s only 6 songs and Sicheng is a fast learner) reminds him of his days as a young skater and having to spin about 4 hours a day. He’s now sure that Sicheng was probably drilled with similar level of discipline as a young boy.

They were expecting to finish around 4am in the morning, but it turns out that Mark and Donghyuck needed to take turns sleeping because they get moodier as the night dragged and they get closer to starting a fight whenever one of them starts yelling. Jaemin still doesn’t know what had caused their big fight in the last summer and Jeno has never been keen to talk about it, but Jaemin knows how it feels to be sidelined for reasons beyond your control, so he’s glad that they can help their hyungs.

“Aren’t you proud of me?” he says to Jeno.

Jeno only smiles weakly, because he’s sleepy as hell.

“Not really.”

Damn, Jaemin thinks.

 

 

*

 

 

Chenle can’t take it anymore, and neither can the rest of the team. Sicheng immediately snores when he falls to the ground as the sun rises up, and everyone else later follows suit. Donghyuck mutters something about what happens if the manager-hyung finds out that they have been up all night and Mark mumbles about how he’s used to only one-hour sleeps and he’s pretty sure that they can get up in time for the next schedule.

Then Renjun also adds about how they can consider themselves pretty successful since they got Sicheng-ge to master Fire Truck and Cherry Bomb and since they got him this far, if the hyungs want to perform anything they should just perform those two. Jaemin doesn’t say anything, Jeno probably meowed in his sleep and Jisung is so tired that he’s not snoring.

Truth be told he would have wanted to enjoy his big brother moment a little more, because after having spent his entire life being sheltered by everyone around him, Chenle wants to be able to take care of someone, even if Jisung is technically younger than him, because sometimes it feels like he’s still being taken care of.

He’ll worry about that when he wakes up later, but for now, he’s taking a tiny nap.

 

 

*

 

 

Jisung wakes up after around 90 minutes to the sound of heavy footsteps. It takes him a while to realise, but when he understands what’s happening, he wakes up the rest of them immediately.

“Guys, guys, guys,” he shakes them one by one. “Wake up, wake up.”

They jolt awake when the manager comes bursting through the door.

“What do you guys think you’re doing?”

Mark quickly stands up and scratches his head for an answer. “We are here to er, do some late night practise with er—guys where’s Winwin- _gege_?”

Jisung looks around him and counts: there are only seven of them around.

The manager isn’t buying their excuse. “All of you, get ready to go to school. NOW. And Mark, go get your makeup done.”

Jisung splashes his face with water and checks his phone. Apparently there are 200 messages in their group chat, mostly just Sicheng asking what went wrong with him and why was he sleeping in the studio with the Dream team, Taeyong and Doyoung asking him questions to confirm his age and identity and Xuxi yelling about where’s this late night Dream party and why was he not invited.

 

 

*

 

 

The first thing that Sicheng discovers when he wakes up is that everyone’s looking at him a bit strangely. Taeyong’s eyes look like they are glistened with tears, Doyoung is checking him from head to toe, Johnny’s touchier than usual, and Yuta refuses to let go despite violent protests from Taeil.

He doesn’t really know what’s going on other than the fact that his legs are more bruised then normal and he’s feeling a bit bloated.

The second thing that Sicheng discovers is that the Dream team is getting a lot of scolding for apparently spending the night trying to memorise the dance to Fire Truck and Cherry Bomb for no particular reason. The third thing is that he has no recollection of what happened the day before, because as far as his memory goes, he has skipped an entire day like he spent the past 24 hours being unconscious.

The final thing that he discovers is the fact that everyone seems more loving than usual—and he has no objections about that.

He’ll find out sooner or later, better later, because his head hurts now and he needs to figure out a way to lose that extra kilo he gained for some unknown reason.

It’s just that he suddenly feels good to be back and from everyone else’s reaction, they feel the same.

 

 

*

**Author's Note:**

> \- come talk to me @ [twitter](https://twitter.com/youkainingenjoo) if you wanna


End file.
